My companions in the outer yard found as much trouble from youth and inexperience with weapons as from any offensive threat. On a late afternoon in early spring, a soldier came rushing at me, hands blood-soaked. I believed he was the victim, and took hold of him to examine the wound, but he pulled away.

“Not me, Sensei.” Sometimes the soldiers called me physician, absent any better rank to honor me by.

Behind him, his companion lumbered forward carrying the youngest soldier in the outer yard in two hands. So much blood spattered his body up and down, I was sure the boy must be dead already or would be soon. But he blinked at me through sweat bathed lids, disclosing lucid, fear-stricken eyes, before they rolled back into his unconscious head.

He had severed the femoral artery. I didn’t stop to ask how, but waved him to a bare bunk where I examined the wound. His companions had slowed the blood loss with a strip of fabric tied around the leg to pressure the upper artery, but a hollow sensation washed over me as I saw the artery had not closed—nor could a second pressure bandage fix it.

I waved his companions back.

“Out! Get out and keep everyone away until I tell you otherwise!” I glanced up and down at the long shadows of the empty barracks and then back again at the unconscious boy, fighting for his life. He wouldn’t last much longer.

Gently, I opened the flap of skin again and saw the dead end of the artery, shrinking purplish and bloody inside the lower leg. Both sides of the wound withdrew from each other as if repelled. How could I close them?

I glanced away for relief, and held the breath in my lungs, then forced myself to focus. He had minutes, and not many.

Not thinking any further than the first few steps ahead of me, I found a vial of strong sake, poured it into a dish, and set the dish up on the bunk next to the patient. Then, retreating to the darkest corner of the barrack walls, I altered forms.

Scrambling up the side of the bunk, I waded into the dish of sake, drenching my legs and lower half in the eye-stinging liquid bath. This done, I crept up the side of the patient’s wounded leg, following the path of blood to the dying limb. The artery was devastated—cut cleanly across—it would cling to nothing. And yet I spun a silk thread and wrapped it around again and again, but it wouldn’t hold. I left it to drag a needle from my chest of tools over to the cot, though it cost time, I threaded the needle with my own silk, heaved it up and plied it against the artery wall until it penetrated. Then I dragged it back up to the opposite end of the wound.

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The real difficulty began there. Wading close to the seeping injury, it took everything I had to reach down to find the buried end of the artery where it shrank deep in the pooling blood, and writhed violently with the pulse of his pumping heart.

The red pool threatened to drown me as I struggled to grip it and puncture the artery wall with my needle. I gasped for breath in the lake around me, blood slicking the surface of the patient’s tissue and destroying my purchase as I gripped and gasped for breath, then gripped again.

By degrees, I subdued the writhing artery and bored the needle through that end. When I saw the thread would hold, I filled my lungs with breath.

With another heavy breath, I wove a scaffolding shell around the threaded artery, keeping the center hollow. I wove back and forward over the skeletal pattern until it was knitted close and tight enough to carry liquid.

Gasping and exhausted, I waded out of the pool of blood, and transformed. This was the moment of truth. I had to cut the binding pressurizing the wound and test whether my weaving would carry his blood. I forced a swallow and lifted a knife to the binding. With a sharp thwap of breaking fiber, the leg was free and blood flowed. I held my breath and watched it fill the lower artery, straight through my woven patch.

I watched for several minutes as the lower leg altered from gray to almost pink. Then, I threaded a needle and began to close up the wound. A poultice of plantain and comfrey herbs completed the dressing.

My patient’s complexion shone pale and waxy with sweat by the waning light streaming through the barrack doorway. His breathing was labored, but he was still alive. If he survived the night, he might recover yet. With the release of pressure, my adrenalin failed, and I staggered and fell to the floor.

The sun had nearly set by the time I awakened, and with a start, remembered the boys I had banished from the barracks. I staggered to the doorway where dozens of them milled anxiously in the yard. They stared back at me, faces marked with horror at my appearance in the doorway’s gap.

I looked down and remembered I was naked. Not quite naked. A thick coating of blood blanketed my legs, arms and torso all the way up to the bridge of my nose.